Laughs of the Past

So, I was looking through all my old word documents today, and I found this old Science assignment I did in Mrs. Nelson's class last year. I thought it would be fun to remind the people who I did this with about it. So, if you want take the time to read it, but if not it's ok.

This is for Purple Cows and Marie Degarimore. Good times guys. Good times.

“Ok, now these islands here are the ‘I Know Islands’. Can anyone tell me what is so special about these islands?” Mrs. Jones asked pointing to a place on the map. In the classroom small kids ruffled around small desks, but not a single hand rose. “Come on, I know you all know this. How about you Jesse?” Mrs. Jones suggested after a minute. Smiling and pointing to one of the smallest girls in the class.

“Uhm…” the little girl started trying to think “Well, they’re islands somewhere in the ocean.” The entire class began to laugh at her.

“Now, class. We all know that it is wrong to laugh at someone when they don’t know an answer.” Mrs. Jones scolded, and the children all stopped laughing immediately. “Now Jesse, there is something else about these islands. They all have special houses on them. What kind of houses are these?” Now several hands rose, and Jesse didn’t even try to answer the question.

“Ok, how about you Lauren?” Mrs. Jones said pointing to the girl sitting in the front row of the class. Everyone knew Lauren was the smartest in the class, and probably the smartest in the entire fourth grade.

“Well the ‘I know Islands’ are a group of islands that each have large, active volcanoes on them. There’s Glucosia, Turtleania, Einsteinia, Beef Jerkia, and Candy Cania. The islands were founded by a group of five geologists. Sage Madsen, Heather Gurr, Mary Lauren Harris, Madison Randquist, and Jessica Correle” Lauren said. “Each of the volcanoes has a house on it. Volcano houses. They were one of the first people in the world to build these houses, and they were made rich for it, except they already were rich.”

“Good Lauren.” Mrs. Jones encouraged, “Today we are going to talk about one of those islands, and one of the founders, and their volcano house. The island of Beef Jerkia is one of the ‘I Know Islands’ and it was founded by Madison Randquist in 2017.”

“That’s a long time ago.” One of the boys in the class said.

“You’ll learn soon enough that fifty years is not that long.” Mrs. Jones said to the boy before continuing, “Madison Randquist wrote a book about her house, and her island. Today I am going to show you some pictures and read you a few passages from her book, and tomorrow we are going to have a quiz on it, so you better pay attention.”

Most of the class got out paper and a pencil to take notes, but one girl raised her hand. “Yes Jessica?”

“Do we need to take notes?” she questioned. Jessica asked questions about everything, but because of it she got a pretty good grade.

“Well you should decide that for yourself. If you think you can do good on the quiz tomorrow without notes, then don’t take notes, but if you think you’ll need to study tonight, then take notes.” Mrs. Jones smiled at Jessica.

Jessica got her notebook out and turned to her section for science while everyone else waited for Mrs. Jones to begin.

“Ok, let’s begin with her explanation of why she built the house. Ok?” Mrs. Jones asked.

Some people in the class nodded, including Heather who sat in the front row near Jessica and Lauren.

“Well, many people have asked me why I built a house on the side of a volcano, and many people have told me I’m crazy, and that I’m going to die in this house, but I don’t really believe I will. I’ve designed this house with the dangers in mind, and I hope that I can show the world just how safe a volcano house is.” Mrs. Jones began reading. “When I first began plans for my house someone told me I needed a name for it, and so I started searching for the perfect name…

Eventually I came up with ‘La Casa Vulano’, Italian for “the volcano house”. People asked me if the name was significant, and when I told them it wasn’t, that I had just used a translator to find a name that sounded right, most of them were disappointed. The name really had nothing to do with the project, except that it said what it was in a different language.

One of my friends told me they thought it represented that I wanted to learn new things. They said that by choosing a name in a language I didn’t speak I was saying that I was open to learning new things, and also that I accepted different cultures, and different ways of living. I don’t think it was that complicated. I just thought it sounded fun.

So that’s how my house got its name. La Casa Vulano took two years to design and another three to build. It was a good design, but it was a lot harder to build than necessary. I think that if I had spent more time planning the construction it might have worked better, but I didn’t. I’ve never been very organized.

I built La Casa Vulano because when my Uncle Mario (who I never actually met, and barely knew existed) died he let me more money than I could ever count, more specifically $50,000,000,000,000,000,000. The reason I had never met Uncle Mario was because he was CRAZY! Not just hear voices in your head crazy, but imagine purple flying cows in your bathtub crazy.

My uncle said that the only way for me to collect the money was for me to build a house that touched in some way, the side, and I’ll bet you won’t be able to guess… of and active volcano.

It surprised me to find out that a few of my friends also had recently deceased uncles, and so got together and went to buyanunchartedisland.com. We called them the I know Islands because when we were in Mrs. Nelson’s science class ten years before we had been really hyper one day. We all were trying to get Sage to stop saying I know. So when we all found out that we were supposed to build volcano houses we decided to build them together.

That’s how we founded the ‘I know Islands’.”

The class had mostly been paying good attention so far. They had all heard about the ‘I Know Islands’, La Casa Vulano, and the other volcano houses there, but they hadn’t ever heard about why they built the volcano houses. The story about the crazy uncles was almost to crazy for them to believe.

“That’s not true.” Catherine blurted out while taking notes “They didn’t have crazy uncles who gave them the money. They won it in the lottery. I researched it.” Catherine lied. She had not researched it, but she had heard it from someone that she believed. Catherine was a liar, but she was nice, and she was pretty smart. Though, there was no way she was smarter than Lauren.

“It’s true Catherine. Madison wrote it herself. Why would she lie?” Mrs. Jones asked looking at Catherine sincerely. She really wanted to know why Catherine thought that Madison had lied in her own book.

Catherine didn’t answer but instead let Mrs. Jones continue.

“Ok, now I’m going to show you a picture of the front of La Casa Vulano.” Mrs. Jones said closing the book and looking for the picture on her desk.

She pulled it out from a stack of papers and held it up. “This is La Casa Vulano from the main entrance.” She handed the picture to Lauren “I’m going to pass it around. Be careful, and don’t write on it.” She said looking mainly towards the boys in the class.

“Ok, now class I am going to read you a description of La Casa Vulano. This is not from her book, but from a book one of her friends wrote describing all of the houses.” Mrs. Jones picked up a new book and began to read. “La Casa Vulano is located on Beef Jerkia and encloses a large volcano known as Montagna Vulano, Italian for Mountain Volcano.” Mrs. Jones said. She picked up another picture off her desk and showed it to them. It was a map of the island.

Mrs. Jones put the map down and continued reading “The house is shaped like a triangle and goes all the way around the volcano. There are towers at each corner, and each one has a dome on top that is in overlapping sections…

Miss Randquist was heard saying once that this was one of her safety precautions. She said that she has a team of volcanologists living with her that help her determine when the volcano will erupt, and when there is an alert they domes will flatten out into a shield. These domes are made out of a bendable form of concrete that Madison created called Incurvo Silicas.

This concrete can stand outstanding heat, and can be bent into a different shape. Some people have said that this would be unreliable because it would bend while it was supposed to be shielding the house, but it isn’t. Once it is bent into the desired position it stays that way.

The three long hallways that connect these towers unhinge at the center and then slide into each of the towers so that they are shielded during an eruption.

Just in case the shields fail there is a button in the volcanologists’ quarters that makes the shield drop half of the overlapping sections and create propellers to lift the three sections of the house into the sky and to the nearest open runway.
The house has eight levels above ground, a basement, and the containment level that is used if all else fails. Each level contains twelve rooms, except for the containment level which has an extra room for food storage. Total (excluding the containment level) there are eighty-five rooms in the house. There are fifty five bedrooms, ten public bathrooms, seven kitchens, and twenty-four other rooms.

The basement level is for the volcanologists. The ground level is for the maids and chefs, the second floor is for Madison, the third through the seventh floors are rented out vacationers and such, and the eighth floor is for visiting friends and family.

The containment floor was designed just in case her other escape plan fails. The containment floor has ten bedrooms, three bathrooms, one recreation room, and one kitchen. It is so far underground that the heat from the volcano can be felt, if you were outside of the room.

The walls of the room are made out of palmarius-estus, which means outstanding heat in Latin. Palmarius-estus is a material that is like a metal, except its melting point is so high no one has ever discovered it.

To get into the room you have to put on a protective suit that will deflect most of the heat so that it isn’t hot enough to burn you. The door to the floor is always left open unless they have to use the room, because once you close the door it is sealed by the heat.

The way this works is that once they are inside the room there is a button next to the door that closes the door and releases a substance called superseal that sticks better than any other substance when heated to extreme temperatures.

Once in the room they sit there for a few days until they are sure it’s safe to leave. Then they call someone on one of the other islands to come down to the room and press the release button on the outside of the door.

So La Casa Vulano is a pretty safe house considering it’s that close to a volcano, don’t you think?” Mrs. Jones asked her class shutting the book and holding it in her right hand.

“I know!” Jesse exclaimed making Jessica, Lauren, Heather, and Catherine laugh. The rest of the class looked at them strangely; they couldn’t see what was so funny.

Mrs. Jones laughed at the five girls. “Ok, we’re going to talk about one more part of La Casa Vulano before we move onto math. I sent Madison a letter when I was first learning about her volcano house, and I asked her how she designed it. I’m going to read you what she wrote back to me, and then we’ll move on. Ok?”

The class nodded, and Heather, Jesse, Jessica, Lauren, and Catherine sat forward in their seats. They had really gotten into this.

“Dear Amy,” Mrs. Jones began, and some of the class laughed. “What, are teachers not aloud to have first names?” she asked her class and then continued “I have thought about how to answer this letter for a couple days now…

I must tell you I did not design La Casa Vulano by myself; in fact, I had so many people help me. I can’t hardly call it mine, other than that I own it. Other people have asked me this question before, and I must say I never really cared about the answer. “Oh, it took time, and a lot of hard thinking.” I used to say, but now I think I will answer like this:

“La Casa Vulano was not in the least my design. I had help from geologists, volcanologists, one of my eighth grade science teachers. (Mrs. Nelson, she’s the best teacher I ever had.), my friends, and many others.

We came up with the materials we were going to use by testing them in extreme temperatures. Most of the house is built of plain concrete, the only things that aren’t are the containment level, and the shields.

From the bottom of each of the towers there is a thick palmarius-estus pole that goes four miles under ground to make sure that lahars don’t cause the house to slide away from the volcano, and during construction we went over the walls so many times to make sure that there was no way the lava would get in and ruin everything inside the house.

So we spent two years designing it to avoid almost every possible disaster. Then we spent three years making sure there were no faults in our design. The problem with taking so long to build it was that every time there was an eruption we had to fix everything that got messed up during the process of the eruption.

I’ve lived through plenty of eruptions in this house, and I hope to live through many more in my lifetime.”

I hope this answered you question Amy. I know it definitely got me thinking. I’m glad to know that some people are interested in how we made La Casa Vulano instead of just why we made it.

Thanks,

Madison Randquist

So there you go. That is how they designed La Casa Vulano.” Mrs. Jones said right as the recess bell rang. “Ok, go to recess.” She laughed as her class all began to get out of their seats and head for the door, “But as soon as you get back it’s time for that math test!” she called after them hearing several of them moan at the thought of a test.